I’m not 100% done with sprucing up my blog design, but that’s mostly because I don’t think I’ll ever be completely finished tweaking my website to look and act the way I want it to. Every so often I’m overcome with a need to fix a million small things all at once, which means long to-do lists and even longer hours spent trying to figure out one seemingly simple thing. That happened earlier this Spring and thankfully, for now that storm has passed. Lots of things have been updated and more things will continue to be, slowly and steadily. But I think my fit of productivity has given me permission to call this item on my 24 list done!
What exactly did I do? Nothing overly dramatic, just a lot of little changes, which I’m posting about here in case you’re curious. If you usually read in a blog reader, hop on over to the site to see if you like it!
So: I added pagination to the bottom of every page to make navigation easier. I created a Free Downloads page to store my e-book, my wallpapers and the occasional spreadsheet. It’s not perfect yet, but at least it’s there. I updated my Books page to include a hyperlink to every single book I’ve read for the past five years. My travel page now applies to all my travels (not just my trip to Europe) and is now more well-organized. I added new sidebar buttons for different categories and a popular posts widget. I created consistent graphics for all my sidebar sections – they’re the prettiest colour of blue! I updated my header and my Welcome photo and I changed my whole colour scheme to be less pink (though if you highlight anything you’ll still catch a glimpse).
I changed the fonts to one of my favourites and I cleaned up my categories. I added an Archive page to make it easier to find things. I added better options for subscription (Feedly, Bloglovin’ and RSS) to the bottom of the site. I changed the colour of my links and added streamlined social media buttons to the sidebar.
For my personal site, I switched to a very basic theme with a design I liked. I also added a small photography portfolio and links to my social media pages. I pared it down to be very minimal but still effective for connecting anyone looking for me on the web to all the different things I do. I might go back one day and redesign it to look more like my blog, but for now it gets the job done.
I still want to make a few of my pages a little prettier, and do a bunch of other small fixes that are probably boring to anyone without a blog. Possibly this whole blog post is boring to anyone without a blog! But blog design is something that I love to do, and I find it very satisfying. I got a comment recently from someone saying that my blog was really easy to navigate, and hearing that made me so happy. While I want my blog to be pretty, I also want it to be functional and helpful. I’m happy that a lot of the tweaks I’ve made in the last few months have made it more of both.
You can see the rest of my 24 List here.
